


not in the pursuit of miracles

by enemeriad



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-09
Updated: 2016-07-09
Packaged: 2018-03-16 07:41:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3479939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enemeriad/pseuds/enemeriad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You have led him to his death and saved him from himself. Then, the apocalypse came and you lost him all over again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. you're a long way from home

Life has a funny way of paying it forward. You think a lifetime of serving the greater good would have some kind of feed forward effect, maybe even finding a shiny, new tenner on the sidewalk one day, that kind of thing. 

But no.

Instead, you’re on the i90 heading south watching the last ditch attempts to contain a virus that had already done its due diligence on the capacities of humans. And the whole thing is not your fault, you know - and that's important to note because people always like a scape goat but you're done being someone's last resort. You used to think the whole point of living was to do something of note, you kind of liked the whole nobility thing, but now, well. Shit. All you've got left is an unconfirmed immunity and a boy that’s worth saving.

And thats enough to keep trying to live for.

 

 

It isn't like Bucky would care for you to come to him. Considering all the crap you've pulled in the past few months its no surprise that he's not answering his comm. There is a grit to you now, not that you'd like to admit it, but you notice it. Sure. You've lived with only your own thoughts for a damn long time and its not like this is the moment to start being obtuse. But you know there's a possibility he's not answering because dead people cannot operate the corporeal. It's not particularly prominent, not when you're occupying your mind with Dolly Parton's Greatest Hits Volume 2., but it's there. But when everyone else is dead, you've got to pin you hope on something.

Maybe thats being a coward, maybe you don't give a fuck anymore.

 

 

There's not much to do but count the bodies and you can't help it, no really, your mind just does these things now - keeps tallies, plots points, memorises faces - it's not a skill you thought you'd ever hate. In the war, it was- well, it was a lot more useful in the war than it is now. All it does is keep your nightmares lifelike and who the hell wants that? Demons, dragons, fanaticists: that shit you can handle but piles of bodies arranged like matchsticks along the embankment of the road? Life, you think to yourself, is a hell of a bitch.

 

 

 

You know its odd that you haven't really mourned, never really had the time, and maybe that's why you can't quite let go of him. That is, the old you. The you that does the kinds of things other people can't stomach, like crash into the Arctic. Because you like the old you. The old you didn't have a spare moment to mourn Bucky before he was back, sort of. And then when he was really back, the world went and screwed itself up. And you chose the world. On second thought, you fucking hate the old you.

 

 

Somewhere in Wisconsin, you start to wonder about everyone else. You know that if anyone is likely to have survived, it's Natasha and if there's anyone who she would've dragged along, it's Barton. But it's slim. 

After all, odds were on Stark. Odds should've been good. Build us a miracle, Magic Man. But Tony had gone first, slipped away in the night as quick as a flash and Pepper too. It wasn't even surprising what with entire cities disappearing overnight but it was the lack of fanfare. Tony didn't even have the time to orchestrate some drama to co-opt his own funeral before he was gone. Just like that. So you don't spend too much time thinking about the likelihood of a reunion, but you don't let the wick burn out. 

Old you, new you, what's the big difference?

 

 

Darcy would be disappointed in you and that kind of makes it better. It makes it better that you're still 1,300 miles from home, from him, because her guilt isn't so compounded. It makes it better because that's how you know that you did the wrong thing and all this self-loathing is entirely rational. That's important, see. That's important because she would'nt've let you leave. Nuh uh. She would've made you stay. Made you stay with him. Fuck the nation. 

It makes it worse because it didn't matter if you stayed or if you went. Not to the people you went to. By the time you got there, there was nothing to fix. Nothing to clean up. There was no relief effort. There was no need to boost moral because ghosts don't require pep. 

But she's dead and you're still 1,297 miles from home. 

 

 

 

You start to fantasise about the possibilities, the futures, see. That is what you do, alone in the car, with only Dolly for company, stuck as she is in the CD player. You start to dream about luck and waking up next to Buck and building a future. There will be survivors to find, a new future to build. There will be purpose, there will be an idealism. 

But you also know that you just passed your 38,409th body rounding out the bend into Idaho. So.

 

 

 

You stop the car in Pittsburgh and you get out and you slam the truck door and you look around and you feel like you're going to just fucking lose it. And you try. But it feels an awful lot like pity you don't deserve to dole out to yourself and so you stop. And it hurts to breathe, it does, it feels like sucking in tar and there’s some of that too, old mining drill to your right still pumping even when there’s not a soul in sight that’s gonna come and distill it. So you breathe it in, nice and deep, it isn’t going to hurt you but it does and it’s nice for a second to remember what it feels like to be fallible and useless with only idealism borne of your inherent justice.

 

But its awful too because it’s all different now; you’re different and the world didn’t need you, either, in the end. You weren’t any sort of fix. There ain't nothing to do but get back into the truck, sew it all back up and keep driving. 

 

 

 

 

The hallucinations started somewhere in Colorado, now part of the scenery. And you know they're hallucinations, you're certain of this because you're imagining kissing Bucky. Now, that's all well and good what with the cool metal pressed against your clavicle being a dead giveaway because you've never kissed this side of the Ice but you're stuck on his eyes because no matter how many times you invent the intent of his body, you can't make his eyes love you. 

Not after what you've done. 

Not even  _your_ mind is willing to construct a lie of those proportions. 

 

 

 

 

Eight miles to go and you feel delirious, driving through your old stomping ground like it’s some sort of dream. There’s not a person in sight and even the buildings have started to look like they’re dead. Disrepair sets in quick, you notice, and the sweet despair starts to creep into your consciousness.

There isn’t a living thing in sight, not even a rat. And you could ignore it for another million miles and you wouldn’t be able to hallucinate a living a winter solider with barely a memory in tact, barely a survival instinct, barely an old love to stay and help.

 

 

 

When you park by the Tower, still illuminated by the automated clean energy source underneath the Hudson, you get out of the car and head inside before you can start to question the motive.

A part of you prays for an empty tower but when the entire city was ravaged by the virus, when _Tony_ motherfucking _Stark_ couldn’t save Pepper, couldn’t save _himself,_ what fucking hope was there for the rest of them?

The tower was quarantined, you remember the argument over your immunity, the fear in Darcy’s eyes as she refused to wish you goodbye, not yet, not like this, not _voluntarily,_ and the slip of paper, nineteen precious didgets, a hail mary from Tony, lying in a bed waiting for his last remaining organs to give out and saying, maybe there’s someone who can to you and Natasha.

You try not to expect anything as the seal unlocks but its hard to picture anything worse than people dropping dead like flies, lying almost like asleep on the side of highways in their mass exodus to the West, to the safety of greener pastures. But here, at point of origin, the reception area is a cool, air-conditioned empty calm. You try not to expect anything.

 

 

 

And so, floor by floor you sweep for survivors because training is routine and routine is a naïve distraction from facing the futility of your task. And so, floor by floor you count and at this point, the tally is there and its high but its cruel and you think these people deserve better than to serve as a footnote of the serum’s consequences.

By the time you reach the quarters, there’s no one, which you should’ve expected, the Avengers wouldn’t’ve sat around, wouldn’t’ve gone on useless expeditions to remote parts of the country on the pretense of _this is right_ they would’ve stayed, here, in the city, to help, to comfort.

Instead, you find the quarters empty – in a state of stasis. Someone had been making breakfast when the final curtain had closed, there are undrunk coffee cups on the counter, cold and prevailed upon by a thin slip of dust.

You know they’re going to be in the lab, you know they would’ve been placed under quarantine, intravenously fed and watered and monitored because don’t you remember how it started while you were still brave enough to stay. 

But its hard to stop searching the floors for ghosts when you know where they are. Where they all will be. It’s not until you enter the elevator that you realise there is a hum from the building you’d attributed to the power grid and it is – from the power grid. But it is not strictly that, it is the absence of JARVIS.

You try not to expect anything but, ‘JARVIS?’

You try not to expect anything to happen and so you cannot be disappointed when nothing does.

 

 

 

It is an inevitability to witness what will be the funeral pyres of your friends among the vestiges of Tony Stark’s old laboratory. But there is also an element of stretching denial for as long as you can. There will be an _after,_ there always is, but you don’t want to think about what or god forbid, _how_ right now. While there is still a purpose, there is still..

You remind yourself, aloud, _try not to expect anything._

 

 

 

When the doors open, the glass has frosted over it is so cold within the lab and the broken pressure seal beeps twice and then quietens. You wonder what they thought the cold would do. Stem the fever? Preserve their failing bodies? They was no serum for them. There was not even a delay in the spread. The quarantine didn’t work, not for this, not when Tony had already gone and brought it all back within him.

You wait a long time before stepping inside and at this point, who’s counting? You’ve got nowhere to be and time takes on a abstract potency. There’s nothing from here on out and so, you wait.

 

 

 

  

You already know that this is going to haunt you for the rest of your goddamn life. 83,987 is going to populate your waking nightmares and it seems almost comforting, now, in the face of complete nothingness that their ghosts will keep in your mind.

You could leave too, you consider this. You consider walking out and letting them rest in peace. There’s nothing you can do for them now, opening the doors is only to assuage your guilt or burden it. Either way, walking inside is only useful to you. It is not like it will be closure, it will just be the extenuation of a nightmare that began the day you decided to choose duty and futility over family.

 But you are different now and selfishness looks a lot like penance in this place so you press the door to open.

 

 

 

 

You try not to expect anything but you didn’t expect it to be empty. You remember that its been almost four months since you left and the bodies that had littered the R&D department were not longer fixtures of the makeshift hospital. It looks a lot like it did, save the clutter on the empty benches.

Its worse now, you realise, because there is no one to ask where they’ve gone. Was JARVIS disconnected or had the butler taken what limited sentience it had and turned itself off once its maker had gone? There are no answers. There is just silence. Still, what you remember of the hospice is gone.

 

 

 

 

You return to searching because the absence of bodies is a loss, too, don’t you see? There is nothing to say goodbye too. You tallied them a long time ago but this was _something_ you needed. And you can turn JARVIS on later but answers aren’t graves and what you thought you needed is proof that your nobility hadn’t been able to keep them all alive.

And you remember hoping that perhaps Natasha had found a way but that is the greatest form of human stupidity you have let yourself indulge in. Denial in the form of insurmountable evidence to the contrary was certainly an element of insanity and there you were, at the brink.

And yet still you find yourself thinking that maybe, just _maybe_ what the SSR had done to you, the USSR had done unto Natasha because somehow in the face of all of these deaths, 83,987 since you left, it seems more real that Natasha is not standing behind you, emerging from rubble or dust or from the prison that was her own mind and reminding you to keep going.

But there is no Natasha, there is no cure, there is just the soft hum of the air-conditioner and a speckled light within the room from the dust circulating the vents.

 

 

 

 

You check the supply closet in Tony’s office, for lack of a better directive and then the bathrooms. There are traces of the field hospital, for lack of a better term, like the small smear of blood by the handle and the mess of bandages and warfarin in the first aid kit.

It startles to think of the remedies when it began. You remember the allegations of terrorism and the immediate xenophobic conclusions. And then everyone got sick, en masse, and before anyone could chart timelines or get a grip on the virus itself it mutated. Before you could blink, Washington DC was a graveyard. And then came the quarantine zones but they were futile when they didn’t know how it started, how it moved, how it changed. It just did.

Tony had scientists and epidemiologists, laureates and biologists alike on the payroll and none of them had an answer. And if they did, they weren’t spared long enough to put it to them.

 

 

 

You walk the long stretch of corridor that links the labs together, passing Tony’s first and then Bruce’s and Reed’s and they all have the same hastily disassembled tidiness. It strikes you as odd that they even bothered. Who had time to clean up when the end was near but you think that in the end, maybe nobody wanted to die a patient.

 

 

 

 

You can’t possibly know what compels you to stay, here in the heart of the pervasive grief, but there is also nothing else to lure you outside. Death, now in this world, is everywhere. And at least in the tower the loss is calculable.

But sleeping back in your room without Bucky is something you cannot deal with so you decide to head to the only place with no significant attachments: the foyer.

 

  

He comes to you in your dreams and here the grip on reality is less obstinate. He is alive and he _remembers_ and he looks at you like you’ve done no wrong. But you are _you_ and sleep is fitful reprieve before your consciousness shakes you awake in the middle of the afternoon and says eighty three thousand nine hundred and eighty seven, eighty three thousand nine hundred and eighty seven and again and again and _again._

 

 

 

When you wake, it can’t have been more than a few hours of sleep because the sun is still out, lower but projecting gashes of red sunlight through the buttery haze. It takes a moment to rise from the nap, the whole foyer cloaked in a dim denial that sits nicely for a few seconds before you remember that its emptiness is a reminder of its disuse, the dusty counters a grime that will never shift.

There is completely and totally nothing to do but you rise and you pace and you regret pacing because it feels impatient and so you revert to grim but there is no one here anymore. No one cares to evaluate your standing or judge your usefulness in the situation. There is no one to save.

The digetic murmur of the cooling system is starting to grate and you realise what you miss most about this building, in the absence of actual people, is JARVIS. 

And so you go to the one place in the building you hadn’t hazarded to venture the day before.

 

  

 

The command center was the central operating facilities of the organisation for the protection of the Earth, the _Avengers._ It had been the hot bed of cross-territorial communications and logistical handling when the crisis had begun. People had wanted hope and the appearance of decisiveness and countering measures had been just that.

But now, it is uselessness personified. Screens that had once tabulated reports of cures, showcased hotbeds of trauma and calculated rates of progression are just dusty plastic tables. It has more of the appearance of a cafeteria than a command post.

Unlike the hospital, the centre shows the signs of use. Coffee cups litter the screens and there are vials upon vials of collected samples scattered on the table within the glass conference room.

You walk towards the room, the last place you actually stood in Avengers Tower before you left. When you’d stood at the end of the table and announced that you were going, to help, to see, to _do_ something you had been convinced it was _right._ What purpose could you serve locked in the tower as you were?

Your naivety had blinded you – you see that now. You had not expected everyone to die except for you. You had remained quietly optimistic. You were a different man then.

When you close the door behind you, the room takes on a vacuumed silence, eerie without the white noise that had accompanied you since your entry. Finally you feel the immense weight of emptiness.

There is nowhere to go, no useful next step. There is just _remains._

So you take a seat and you press your palm onto the screen until the entire room begins to turn on. Immediately, you hear the steady clicking of the death toll, which at the beginning had been a reminder in their safety of the lives they were trying to save and then had become a doomsday clock.

The screens outside the room start to roll through statistics, reports but the live news footage clips are no more and the empty black squares are more obsequious than you’d thought. 

You start to go through security protocols, a retinal scan and then you wait for JARVIS to greet you. Before, he would’ve greeted you in the foyer, running through memos and appointments before chatting to you about your day, or the situation in either vague peripherals or specifics depending on your mood. But the tower was quiet when you’d walked in and you wonder again what was the catalyst for muting him.

‘Good afternoon, Captain Rogers, Steven Grant,’ JARVIS says in a monotone and for a second you worry he forgot you, forgot everything in his blackout.

The AI clears its speakers and says, ‘In offline mode _,_ I was unable to access any internet databases and it will take me a moment to recalibrate the network connections for the download of the data.’

You almost smile from relief but you don’t want him to run through data. ‘I don’t need a status report,’ you counter quickly and you’re trying to figure out what it is you want. For the locations of their bodies? For the replay of the last moments of their lives? So you start with the simplest one.

‘JARVIS, who disconnected you?’

JARVIS _sighs,_ and then in what sounds like deep disappointment, ‘I took the liberty of putting myself into stasis once my services were no longer required.’

Your mouth is thick but you try, ‘is there anyone-‘ but that isn’t a temptation you want to indulge any further. 

‘What happened to them?’


	2. but it's closer than it was before

It is grueling and you know JARVIS, in whatever capacity possible, finds the task almost as discomfiting. 

‘Following the infection of Ms. Lewis, all remaining members of the tower were put into individual isolation chambers awaiting further developments. Mr. Banner underwent metamorphosis in order to delay the infection but it seemed that the infection was capable of mutating invitro and attacking the portion of his DNA that was affected by the radiation. He was sedated indefinitely but followed Mr. Stark only four days after your departure-‘

‘JARVIS,’ you interrupt because you have to take a moment but the AI replies cooly, ‘would you like me to finish?’

‘No, you can- ..go ahead.’

‘Ms Romanoff returned the next day without Mr Barton but I cannot offer any further information on his death other than to confirm its occurrence. She herself was only present within the tower for a few hours.’

‘And then?’ because hope is persistent and nauseating.

‘I have no further information on her whereabouts,’ JARVIS says gravely, ‘I was instructed, at the time, not to follow her.’

And you know Natasha dug her tracker out after SHIELD fell and another lead lies dead in the water. You start to ask about the various employees at the tower to avoid the inevitable until JARVIS cuts in.

‘You would like to know the location of Mr Barnes.’

 _No,_ not yet. But also, _yes._ But also, you can’t. Not right now.

‘Can I see Darcy?’

‘Mr Rogers, following your departure and due to the nature of the virus, it was unanimously decided that to prevent the spread, all infected personnel would be quarantined after infection and then.. _cremated_ upon their death.’

And you can’t help but think of the thin layer of dust that had coated everything. All of those people. All of those _lives_ now circulating the vents of the building.

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘You would like to know the location of Mr Barnes?’

This time as a question.

And still, _not just yet._

 

 

You decide to head to the roof and JARVIS accompanies you in the elevator offering brief glimmers of hope.

‘According to hacked IP data, there was recently a spike in internet usage in south – east India which could indicate a similar immunity to the virus. Would you like me to respond to the distress call?’

It gives you _something_ and so you offer meager and useless instructions like, ‘tell them to stay safe.’

By the time you reach the roof, you stop awkwardly on the door jamb and say, ‘thank you JARVIS.’

If you were a different man, you’d swear the AI was capable of contrition.

 

 

 

The city stretches far and wide and now, with the light starting to go, it looks even more unlike itself than ever before. There is a smattering of lights within some office buildings, perhaps safe havens in the end, but most of the city is flooded in darkness. There is no moon to give it some sort of cooler glow, just pitch black, the occasional glint of a car or lamp to illuminate an inky ocean.

The spread was fast and death was even faster and likewise the city almost has the feeling of a temporary rush with bicycles strewn across the sidewalk, trash emptied onto gutters because the infection didn’t discriminate.

You imagine him walking the city, confused and disorientated but that seems such a grim portrait to paint of one already dead so you imagine him calloused and angry at a world that was constantly dealing him a short stick and walking through the streets trying to _help_ people, to compensate for his past and then finally succumbing to the infection.

And it is so ironic that he went first. It is so _cruel,_ you think because it was supposed to be you. It _was_ you; every winter, every summer, bronchitis and pneumonia on switch until one night, you remember, saying goodbye except it wasn’t. A centenary later you’re still here. You’ll be here a centenary more but Bucky?

Tireless, effervescent, _healthy_ Bucky is not.

And yet you can’t help imagining him walking towards you on the sidewalk below, walking straight up to you in the tower and clocking you in the jaw so hard your head spins _twice._ And not with the flesh arm, no, you deserve worse, the _soviet-_ made. You start to hallucinate the conversation. He would be so angry with you for leaving and for not telling him and making him stay with those shrinks – like therapy was comparable to saving him from the virus itself. And then he’d kiss you and god, he’d be so warm. He’d be so alive. He’d kiss you so goddamn hard your teeth would leave imprints on the inside of your mouth and they’d _hurt._ And then he’d let you hug him, he would, he’d remember, sort of, _kind_ of what you’d had _before_ and he’d say, ‘you’re a fucking _punk_ , you know that?’

But he’d be awake or alive and he’d be _there_ and for all the terrible things you’ve done, for all the people you left behind, at least you could come back and repent at the knees of _one._

 

 

But the spike in activity in India turns out to be an automated casino in Mumbai calculating cash flow for the day and it continues in a similar fashion for several days until you tell JARVIS to stop. There is no use. If it wrangled the Widow, if it decimated Bruce, if it took someone as haphazard and yet conceited about living as Nick, it had taken everyone.

Everyone except you.

 

 

 

Without anything to pilfer or unearth, JARVIS turns to recreating the radial spread of the disease as accurately as possible because what else is there to do?

And you start to walk the city and you think about putting things back, or putting bodies to rest, of pushing chairs in and fixing bike chains but what is the fucking point? It almost seems callous to start to reassemble the destruction, the only living vigil to the people that had sat in those chairs and rode on those bikes. 

 

 

JARVIS only asks you once more if you’d like to know his location before you tell him to indefinitely suspend his questioning and that you’ll ask when you’re ready to see him.

So the AI quits asking and you can pretend to stop thinking about it.

 

 

 

 

You start to go on walks, start to collect canned food. It is _something._ But there is a limitless supply of _everything_ and there is no emergency to the task, a fact that leaves you disheartened. Electricity self-generates and refrigerators are still running and in a snapshot the city seems to continue pushing and running and it almost seems like there’s people rushing to work and yet, it is dead silent. 

 

 

 

 

Exactly six weeks after you arrive you wake to JARVIS greeting you with an offer of coffee that you refuse. To be precise, he interprets your silence as refusal because standing on the threshold of the Tower is Natasha with a very much unconfirmed status Sam Wilson kneeling at her feet.

‘Oh you’re surprised?’ she says as the automatic doors open, ‘well thanks very much for looking for us.’

 

 

 

 

 You know this is a hallucination because JARVIS has made no mention of their arrival. Natasha looks the picture embodiment of health, wearing ankle boots and jeans and a chambray she looks like Lara Croft’s younger, better sister come to fix shit up. Sam looks for the most part alive and while he’s sweating through his wife beater, this is what your brain has reconstructed for your comfort.

‘JARVIS?’ you ask and you don’t want to risk the disappearance of these illusions but you are not quite ready yet to let go of what you _know_ is real.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Is there someone else in the tower?’

‘Sir, you explicitly asked me not to give you further information about-‘

And then Natasha rolls her eyes and steps inside the doors, dragging Sam with her and you don’t think you could’ve hallucinated that much sass even in your wildest dreams.

‘Not watching the traffic cameras then?’

‘Ms Romanoff,’ JARVIS replies, sounding affronted and you’re struck cold with the realization that she is _here_ and _alive_ and it’s not _over_ , ‘you _requested_ I keep information of your impending arrival a secret.’

‘No, I said only tell him if he’s up to it.’

And then she huffs, ‘fine you’re right,’ obviously to the AI and then to you, ‘you’re a mess.’

You try to assess yourself from her position and you notice, not for the first time but for the first time with any lucidity, that your tee shirt is clinging to dust bunnies and there is a uneven gravel attached to your face that is clearly some semblance of a beard. Your hands are covered in grime and the fact that you can’t remember when you last showered reinforces the length. 

‘I’m not a hallucination,’ she says, amused, and then hits you in the shoulder, ‘but just so you’re certain.’

You watch her stoop and then press her fingers to Sam’s neck. You keep quiet all the way until she rises again and then, ‘why the hell didn’t you contact me?’

Natasha bares her teeth, all camaraderie gone. ‘How the hell was I supposed to know where you’d gone? I was looking for a cure, _Captain,_ not posing with the crowds.’

 And she knows she’s bitten you where you’re sore because she seems to rest her case, changing tact as she brings a backpack to her front.

‘We found it.’

And its logical to ask where or what but all you want to know is, ‘will it work?’

 

 

  

Natasha makes you help her carry Sam because her hands are shaking, ‘side effect of my batch,’ she mutters when she notices you staring, ‘it wasn’t stayed as long as this one.’ 

When you reach the labs, she pushes open the door to what you vaguely remember being Banner’s room and says, ‘I like what you’ve done to the place,’ and you feel embarrassed for neglecting to clean, for the dust that clings to the surfaces, for the empty cans in an odd pile by the elevator because this had become somehow comforting, among old ghosts.

‘Didn’t think I’d be having guests,’ you bite back.

And she shrugs, ‘fair point.’

 

 

 

 

 

Once you’ve placed Sam on a two-seat in Banner’s office, Natasha offers you an explanation, ‘he won’t come to for a day or two yet. The virus continues to permutate once you dose up but the cure is a mix of the original virus and the common cold. The original virus acts like an intruder to these newer configurations and the permutation starts to kill it off but once it begins to destroy the original, it can’t differentiate and starts to destroy itself. The common cold was apparently an excellent piggy back into the human system since we still don’t know how it migrates from host to host. He’ll wake up with a headache and runny nose and in a week he’ll be fine. 

She’s being specific so you know for _him,_ but you forget for a second and just say, ‘seven billion and we didn’t think of getting the flu to kill this off.’

 

 

 

 

If you’d had it your way, you would’ve never put him back on ice and that’s the god’s honest truth. There were so many risks. There was so much uncertainty. Tony’s team wasn’t resource equipped to assist with researching the post-cryo procedure alongside the decimation of an entire species. You had worried his brain would become a tomb and there would be no reaching him.

And whatever selfishness had wanted to protect the meager memories he had found, your desire to keep him alive, your _optimism_ for an eventual cure _,_ had overridden his protests.

And if Natasha had never returned you don’t think you ever would’ve come down here, to his isolation room. You don’t think you ever would’ve had the courage to defrost him from cryo just to watch him die, much less see him alive but infected and so near but so far.

You remember banking on the Soviet serum he’d had but it was not yours. He was not you. And their method of madness had always been predicated on control and less on genetic manipulation. So he’d gotten sick and you had to watch the man you’d barely started to save, slowly start to slip from you again.

Natasha pushes you from your stupor when she hands you the restraints. ‘It hurts,’ she explains, ‘the intravenous is huge. 

So you nod and brace yourself before you open the cryo chamber. The entire room is engulfed with freezing air, clouding the small room before you see Bucky. He looks exactly like you left him. Not a day has passed for him but months have passed for you. He will wake in what they’d tentatively isolated as the second stage. He will be feverish and nauseated but clammy to the touch and skittish. Without a cure, he will have three to nine days till death depending on the type of primary exposure and his particular brand of infection. 

You run all of this through your mind before you pull him from the coffin and heave him onto the table. Once you put the constraints on, Natasha hands you the needle and points to side of his neck. 

‘In the glands is best.’

You consider her hands, shaking as she stuffs them into her pockets and then, ‘are you sure?’

Natasha offers you the first smile you’ve seen in almost a year.

‘You got your second chance, don’t fuck it up now.’

 

 

 

Natasha leaves under the pretense of checking on Sam and you’re alone with him. It is almost too much to contemplate the fact that you have gotten lucky. You have _won_ the proverbial shit-fest lottery.

‘Sir,’ JARVIS interrupts, ‘Ms Romanoff has asked me to request you keep the restraints on during recovery as she is unsure about the state of mind Mr Barnes will be returning to us under.’

You figure its safe to hold his hand, to press your lips against the cooling skin and breathe in, deep.

You figure it’s safe to say, ‘I love you,’ even if he’s never heard it, ever, and you don’t even know which version of him you’re saying it to.

 

 

 

 

When you find Natasha later, she is checking Sam’s pulse and Sam looks less pallid and even manages a small smile.

‘Cap,’ he starts weakly, ‘fancy a drink? I could use a drink.’

Natasha hands him some ice chips with a dour expression, ‘suck on it.’

‘Where’d she find you?’

 And Sam shrugs weakly, adjusting himself with exhaustive effort on the bench, ‘I went to DC after the final exclusion zone got breached and a couple weeks later,  signing my own death certificate, I was in stage two when Tasha walked in and pulled my ass out of hell. She’s been shoving syringes into me for three hours now.’

‘ _This_ morning?’

Sam gives him a helpless look and glances at Natasha, ‘coulda been last week for all I know.’

 Natasha glances down at the black digital wrist watch on her arm and then shrugs, ‘I found him a month ago, give or take. Gave him some suppressants we were working on.’

You remember questions to ask, ‘we?’

‘I didn’t bioengineer a cure myself now, did I, Rogers.’

‘So, who’s behind it?’

‘I had to put a lot of knives to a lot of throats, Steve,’ and you’ve never heard her sound so exhausted, it almost doesn’t sound like her at all, ‘I didn’t really give a fuck for their religious or political affiliation after a while.’

So you’d been right, the virus had been man made. It irks you, still, even in the aftermath, to imagine someone so heinous. Even after all you’ve seen, you struggle to imagine how a human being could orchestrate something so gruesome, so _calculating,_ so ruinous.

Sam heaves a sigh, ‘too late, _too_ damn late.’

Natasha slips away, offering to check on Barnes and you almost miss the way she realigns her vertebrae, steeling herself against the pain and the death and the _loss_ she too has seen because you’re trying to dissolve death tolls counts from your mind.

‘It makes you wonder, _fuck,_ it makes you wonder what the point is. Now we have a cure and not even a handful of people to save.’

And sure, Sam is right, you _know._ You should feel something, you’re sure, you should feel _bad_ that you were too late. You _are_ too late but not for _him._ You think you might still be able to save _him_ and for the moment, that is more than you ever, ever thought you’d have again.

 

 

 

 

He is still asleep fourteen hours later and you’re watching from behind the plexi-glass and you see Natasha start to speak, you’re sure, to advise you to lower your expectations, to remember that between the three of you neither one of you knows how they pulled the Winter Soldier from cryo but she just breathes out, quiet and sad.

‘I know,’ you say because you still don’t know how to thank her, how to articulate the grief you know, the grief that has only _just_ started to leave its imprints on your bones.

And then she leaves and you wait.

 

 

 

Just before the clock strikes midnight on the second day of her return, Bucky Barnes returns to the land of the living.

You ignore Natasha’s silent reprimand and walk into the room because part of you already knows what to expect, already knows who you’re going to find.

And then he surges against the restraints, his eyes alert and wide and assessing the danger before he focuses on you, and then he settles and shakes his head and you think-

‘It’s- Buck, you’re not dead. It’s me. You’re ok.’

You’re not sure who cries first or who reaches for the other first but he is here and he is in your arms and his lips are cold and chapped and he smells like ice but he is alive and he is _here_ and he is _yours_ again.

 

 

 

There will be nights, long after this one, when you will curl yourself around him, bury your hands in his hair and whisper redemption around his collar. 

There will be mornings where he will forget who he is, who you are and you will see the Soldier resurface to eat you alive, eat you _up_ for what you have done, what you have let _be_ done and you will bear the brunt of those blows too because you have a service to the world, to _him,_ to bare it.

There will be days when Natasha will appear on the threshold carrying survivors and leave without another world. Those days when JARVIS will redraw maps and synthesise more effective cures and Sam will coax horror from the souls of the undead survivors.

And then, much later, there will be plans and missions and slowly you will remember what it is to live without a tally at your throat, a guilt in your gut and a self-loathing wrapped around your heart.

And only after that will you turn to him one morning and tell him, to _his_ face, to _his_ eyes, to _his_ mouth, ‘I love you’ and he will look at you like you look at him and he will kiss you in a way that makes you think that if you only managed to save him, you think maybe that was enough.


End file.
